Why measuring emotions is the next big thing in social listening?

Why measuring emotions is the next big thing in social listening?

Why measuring emotions is the next big thing in social listening?

It is scientifically proven that nonverbal communication represents ⅔ of all communication. Why do we forget about the nonverbal elements such as voice quality, speaking style, intonation, stress and things like this in the social media communication when in everyday conversation we care quite a bit about it?

In the digital world we mostly measure words, even though we communicate using both words and emotions in our everyday life? We check what people are talking about, we don’t measure how they are talking.

What if a marketer understood the nonverbal context of his audience, or if an influencer knew the emotional context of his followers?

Wouldn’t those people have more of an advantage over the ones that didn’t have this kind of knowledge? It’s not just about competition here either, we believe that a better understanding of the audience should lead to better content.

As I grow my company to provide a high level of consulting to my clients I thought it would be nice to take this idea of emotional feedback, in order to make better recommendations on solutions overall for the brand that would reflect well with their following. I wanted an dashboard to review this information deciphering data I could actually understand. For the past few months I have been BETA testing Buzzways. I’m not an affiliate of Buzzways an am not involved with the development of their software. I did have the opportunity to be an BETA Tester on this tool and I wanted to share what I found.

What is Buzzways?

Buzzways is an easy-to-use analytical tool that lets you measure the emotions of your audience across different social media. One of the best gains that you will receive from using it is the insight of people’s emotions. It wants to optimize your actions in four different fields based on the information about the mood with different metrics of your online business and these are:

Influence, Traffic, Conversions, and Loyalty.

1. Influence

Usually when people bring up social media marketing goals they talk about raising awareness about the brand and also talk about increasing the online influence. This is important for any business and it is a terrific display of data. When people appreciate a brand and value it they are going to be more likely to talk about it or sharing it on social media by liking things on Facebook or retweeting on Twitter.

Social media channels are really good at increasing the brand recognition of business’ and even sometimes can achieve a lot with a low cost.
However, lots of brands are struggling with social media marketing and never see ROI that they would expect. Tools are needed to enhance social media actions and optimize the performance.

How is Buzzways optimizing Influence?

Right now Buzzways offers correlating audience engagement against the levels of different emotions: joy, sadness, anger, trust, anticipation, disgust, fear and surprise.

In an online communication, you want to seize the moment when when everybody is surprised. The content, information, and the emotional fit of a message with the audience’s mood is important in achieving this. You don’t want to post funny memes when everybody is upset. You don’t want to post serious message when everybody is fooling around.

Buzzways serves you three most correlated emotions at any moment, so you know what kind of emotional context is relevant right now. I really liked the easy to understand dashboard to get a quick glance on these.

What are the other ways to measure your influence online?

The Klout Score

One handy metric is Klout Score. It’s a scale between 1-100 and the higher you score the more influential you are. The Klout Score is measured based on more than 400 hundred signals from different social networks. It uses metrics such as the ratio of reactions you generate compared to the amount of content you share, but it also takes into consideration how selective the people who interact with your content are. The more a person likes and retweets in a given day, the less each of those individual interactions contributes to another person’s score. At best we gauge reactions on engagement on posts and shares that come with it, but the emotional element on this metric creates a whole new element to emotional engagement and for that its not uncommon for this metric to be overlooked. You can check out the whole description on the Klout Score website.

The Klout Score wasn’t a metric I could gauge with Buzzways but will also be integrated in Buzzways soon. It will allow you to compare your influence score with the amounts of different emotions your content is generating.

2. Traffic

Everyone wants to drive more traffic to his or her website and social media is pretty good at fetching new visitors, especially if they are selling something or can provide some extra value to you and your website.

In terms of driving traffic, it is not always easy to determine what kind of content is performing best. It is quite easy to measure the traffic from social networks (for instance using Google Analytics) and even from particular posts (using tags), but it is hard to tell what characteristics of the post triggered users to click through to the website.

It’s not always the information that is working, but the emotional response to your content that drives the traffic.

Without the Integration of Google Analytics it was lacking in this area, but I wanted to mention it because buzzways will also soon be able to integrate your Google Analytics data to see what kind of emotions are driving the most traffic to your website. You can see how this would be an advantage because you can use the emotion that is driving the most traffic to your website to bring even more people to it.

3. Conversions

We see similar situations with conversions. There are many ways to track them but it’s hard to really tell what attributed a real cause to a particular conversion.

There are many different factors that customers think of when buying product. The amount of information provided about the product and the emotional state the person is in are two important factors.Typically speaking, the emotional state was the deciding factor. Through rational choice theory, economical perspective perceives people as rational actors.

If we didn’t have our emotions than we would probably make the best rational choice but that’s not the case. Emotions can greatly play an important role in human decision making, and in many cases making an irrational decision. For example, sometimes it is better to put a price of $0.99 than $1 simply because of emotional response that it triggers.

Behavioral finance has provided proofs stating that financial decisions are significantly affected also by emotion and mood and not only by rational utility maximization. Scientists like Pfister and Böhm have developed a classification of how emotions function in decision-making, that conceptualizes an integral role for emotions, rather than simply influencing decision making. In the dashbard I could navigate to the actual emotion and pull an overview of the Emotion with the correlation to the weeks engagement and a growing word wall that collected keywords. I could also get a comments analysis that showed post that reflected that emotion in the comments of posts.

Buzzways appears to be trying to meet the need of measuring relationships between emotional responses and actual sales although the integrations and options are lacking I can see where this will provide ways to integrate the conversion data in order to compare it with emotional states of buyers. This way, it is easy to assess what kind of emotions sell the product best.

4. Loyalty

It is important for every business to build a relationship with their customers in order to increase sales in the future instead of just a one time sale.

Once again emotions play a big part in all this. There are also number of scientific publications stating that loyalty is connected to emotions (that the entity is causing). It is still very difficult to figure out which emotion is responsible for the most loyal consumers.

Buzzways serves emotions of the most loyal consumers, or the emotions in the most “loyal” intervals of time. These emotions are more likely to cause other users to become loyal as well.

Thoughts?

Throughout this article I have provided some ideas on how measuring emotions can help you promote your products or ideas in the digital world, in addition I reviewed my first attempt at trying to solve this problem of data analytics. The sky’s the limit, when it comes to understanding how emotions can help in communication. At Automate Grow Sell, we want to focus on these four areas first.

Nevertheless, it would be very interesting to hear what are your thoughts about measuring emotions of your followers? Do you have a software tool you recommend for measuring emotions?

What could you accomplish if you knew how emotions spread across the web?

In case you’ve become interested in Buzzways, you can sign up right now for FREE and help while I test the beta version of the app.